Excerpt: The rampage began after citizens demanded that brothels and bars be located at least 3,200 feet away from schools. Within 48 hours, angry mobs had taken matters into their own hands, burning more than 30 establishments. Hundreds of women and transvestites were forced to strip while their belongings were torched; dozens were beaten and mutilated as the police stood by and watched. "It was something we needed to do," says El Alto resident Roberta Quispe Mayta. "Now our husbands will behave better and the prostitutes will leave."

Excerpt: Sayeh is one of the many Iranian transgenders who have experienced such governmental acts of arrest and torture first hand. She was arrested several times by police forces and experienced humiliation and abuse at their hands. Police forces pushed her into a black car, bombarded her with demoralizing and dehumanizing words and took her to a detention centre.

When Khartini Slamah first came out as a transexual, he was a dutiful Muslim son by day and a prostitute by night, working on the streets of the Malaysian capital.

The option of sex change surgery was out of the question in this moderate Muslim country where Muslim transexuals are banned from changing their gender and same sex relationships are a criminal offence.

Dispelling a common myth, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center say vaginal reconstruction should be a matter of preference for most teens or adult women born with a type of inter-sex condition marked by the presence of both female and male genitals.